Start-Up Green Throttle Set To Bring Mobile Gaming To The Big Screen

It seems a week doesn’t go by without another doomer-and-gloomer reporting facts and figures that try to infer console gaming is dying a slow death. There’s no denying the popularity of touch-screen gaming and the like has exploded in recent years, while services like OnLive remove our reliance on consoles in favour of cloud computing. Start-up Green Throttle Games, meanwhile, hopes a console-less future will come in another form: namely, our smartphones and tablets.

Bringing ‘proper’ games to touch-screen devices isn’t anything new (clip-on gaming controllers for everything from iPhone to Android’s best are common suspects), but Green Throttle Games has something else in mind entirely. Led by a team of a surprisingly strong pedigree - including Charles Huang (co-founder of Red Octane), Matt Crowley (product lead for Palm and Nokia) and Karl Townsend (lead engineer for the first two generations of the Palm Pilot) – the company has already secured $6 million in series A funding and has a clear plan in its hand.

Green Throttle is promising to ‘unlock’ the potential within our smartphones and tablets, harnessing the now quite considerable power found in the latest and greatest mobile devices to allow gamers to play titles as found in the Google Play store on the big screen. Looking non-too-dissimilar to a certain Xbox 360 controller, its proprietary Bluetooth controller, the ‘Atlas’ (already on sale), offers full analogue control and that same “console-level precision” we’d expect from Green Throttle Games’ console counterparts. Whether it’ll be able to replicate the kind of quality coming from a dedicated box of gaming goodness is unclear, as is the way Green Throttle will market its products. With Ouya on the horizon, a couple of big publishing deals on Throttle’s side wouldn’t go amiss – perhaps a medium-sized budget game built specifically for the console?

Still, the names behind the scenes are a good enough reason to be extremely excited by what Throttle has in store. “It is time to think of mobile games in a whole new way,” reports the company on its website. “Green Throttle, games re-imagined.”

Valve Brings Steam To The Living Room With 'Big Picture'

A lot of talk gets slung around about what’s better, PC gaming or console. It's a debate that continues to rear its ugly head whenever gamers of different backgrounds/tastes are in the same vicinity (that is, once we leave our bedrooms), but it's also one that so often is settled when everyone can come to agree it's not necessarily what's 'better' per se, but one that boils down to what each feels most comfortable with. Valve's very latest addition to Steam, however, has the potential to blur the lines between the two. It's called 'Big Picture' and it's everything you love about Steam, in your living room.

An Introduction To 'eSports' And The World Of Competitive Gaming

The idea of playing games competitively has existed for a long time, but only relatively recently have ‘eSports’ come into their own as a spectator sport. With games like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends gaining popularity in the West; a sprawling community of players, commentators and dedicated fans is growing ever larger day-on-day, hour-upon-hour.

OnLive comes to Tablets and Smartphones

Brazenly fending off the competition (Gaikai & the recently-unveiled Approxy), OnLive has today made its cloud gaming service available on a range of smartphones and tablets – making triple-A gaming on the go a truer possibility.

Sega's return to the console business: urinal gaming makes a splash

The Dreamcast was awesome, and we were sad to see it disappear in the face of Sony's PS2. At this point, we thought that Sega was officially out of the business of making consoles: the flame had been extinguished...but no more. Introducing the "Toylet."

Remember the urinal gaming concept we found before? Turns out the guys at Sega fell in love with the concept, and created their own console to enter this clear market, full to the brim with credibility. Instructions are simple: pee to play the game.